She’s a decadent pastry filled with whipped cream and laughter!” A cup of hot chocolate after a long walk in snow. “Sophie! My dear!” cries Vlad, prancing around the (German?) countryside with flowers in his hair, like Puck himself. But it’s only once they recruit Anya and the trio are on their way from Moscow to Paris (1,715 miles, I’ll remind you) that we realise why Vlad is on this trip in the first place. He’s the leading man’s bumbling sidekick, he can afford to be chill about things. Moscow, it seems, is primarily filled with people whose teeth and tongues are too big for their faces, and those with good bone structure must escape, now, today, as soon as possible.ĭimitri has a real bee in his bonnet about finding a girl to play Anastasia, whereas Vlad seems a little more chill about it. Dimitri and Vladimir are looking for a way out of Moscow, and any way will do. But there is no more treasured side detail than that of the relationship between Vladimir, Dimitri’s partner in crime, and Sophie, the Dowager Empress’s cousin. The refrain on ‘Rumour in St Petersburg’ (“ but please do not repeat!“: so good, so Russian), the struggle to obtain exit visas (travel admin! In a children’s film! Sure!), Josephine Baker’s appearance in the virtually tuneless ‘Paris Holds the Key (To Your Heart)’. One of the things that makes Anastasia wonderful – apart from the songs, and the work its done for the popular myth that Anastasia Romanov was un-killable and Rasputin was literally magic – are the side details. You know, the guys who were forced into exile for several years, before being dragged outside in the middle of the night, along with their dog, to be shot to death before their bodies were dissolved in acid? No, it doesn’t scream family-viewing to me either, but nevertheless, someone at Fox animation wrote it and someone else commissioned it and we ended up with a film where Grigori Rasputin’s sidekick is a talking fruit bat. The film is remarkable, and I mean that in both senses of the word: it’s remarkably good, and remarkable in the sense that why, yes, they really did make a kid’s film about the slaughtered children of the Romanov family. If you’re like me, and I do hope you are, you spend an unusual amount of time thinking about the 1997 animated feature film Anastasia.

Anastasia by sophie